Month: June 2017

When coloring my sketches, watercolors are my weapon of choice. Ever since a notorious sketching trip to Istanbul, I adopted watercolor as a portable and practical tool, that would quickly turn my usual black and white sketches into lively eye-candy onsite reportages.

Lately, for professional reasons, as well as personal influences, I’m shifting more and more into the world of watercolor. That is, having both drawing and coloring play equal roles in the final result. So, the International Watercolor Festival jointly organized by AAPOR and IWS in Torres Vedras was a must visit, if only for one day! The festival featured an exhibition of works by international heavyweight artists like Amit Kapoor or Eleanor Hill, but also Portuguese masters like António Bártolo. There were also demos from the pros and art supplies kiosks.

In the late morning, Irina, the Winsor & Newton sales rep in the festival gave a few of us the chance to test, among other materials, a ridiculously thick paper (640g) we decided to dub “Pladur”, after the popular drywall Spanish brand. Its coarse grain is all but incredible to use, but the extra thickness is a feature that I’m still not ready to take advantage of.

Rossio hasn’t got many shades. Despite that, when Pedro Alves and I run out of ideas for places to sketch on lunchtime, we just wander mindlessly to the main square of Lisboa’s downtown and cope with the scorching sun.

During the day, maestros taught the less experienced in the art of the Argentinian dance. In the early evening, champagne bottles would pop-open to celebrate the mixed show of a Buenos Aires band and the singers and dancers that made the audience travel in time and space, across the Atlantic and beyond the equator, to 1930’s smoke-filled clubs of the city on the silver river.

Then, come midnight, all the tables would be removed. The gigantic clubhouse turned into a dancing hall for the all-night milonga that would last until the sunrise. Couples paired for the first dance and they rarely kept together, much like a fast-dating event. Partners experimented each other’s embrace, and looked for a match that would dance them the night away.

As for us, sketchers, we sketched. Not as long as the dancers danced though, for the week had been long for all of us. Myself having the only reference in a single panel of Hugo Pratt’s graphic novel Tango, I tried to follow the master’s lead, as well as the maestros steps both onstage and in the dance hall.

In my second class as instructor in the Urban Sketchers 10 Years x 10 Classes programme in Lisboa, the challenge was to sketch far and below from a skyscraper. But conventional tall buildings are scarce in this capital city, and not very suitable places to sketch from, so I opted to lead the participants to one of Lisboa’s own alternative skyscrapers – the Nossa Senhora do Monte vantage point.

In all of the three exercises, the key skill to focus on was the simplification of the immense sea of detail that the vantage point offered us. First, we simplified horizontally, by translating all of the city’s skyline in a single continuous line, adding detail in but a few buildings that caught our attention, labeling them.

Then, we simplified vertically, finding a path between the roof just under our feet and a chosen destination in the skyline, tracing roofs, windows, facades and streets on the way. Anything that seemed suited to make our sketch progress upwards. On the way, we found a city feature and, exploring it a bit, we wrote a sentence or small paragraph about it.

Finally, we simplified the relationship of people with the city. Outbursts of tourists in the vantage point oversimplify Lisboa – “there’s the place where we were”, “the bridge looks like the one in San Francisco”, “that’s where our hotel is”. Any of those simple sentences could generate a simple story. That story was to be written also in lines, from the person saying it to the place that was mentioned, again, roof to facade, window to street, along a continuous path, simplifying shapes and stories.

As if trumpeting the summer, a scorching near-40-degree south wind from the Sahara swept through the country during the weekend, catching both natives and tourists off-guard. Shades, water fountains and public air conditioned buildings became highly-valued prizes.

The flash thunderstorm came as a surprise to the people in the annual book fair in Parque Eduardo VII. For a few minutes, thick drops of water replaced the baking heat while dark indigo clouds set against a strangely burnt yellow sunset. It was as if the dire palette was the prelude of the soon-to-arrive catastrophic news.

The thunderstorm also hit the center region of the country, igniting a major forest fire in Pedrógão Grande that cut roads, isolated villages and claimed 62 lives. It’s the biggest natural disaster in decades and but one of a total of 156 active fires in Portugal. The government decreed a three-day national mourning while the effects of the tragedy are being quenched and its victims and their families are relieved.